steel, stucco, aluminum, plastic, particle board, glass

I drive through this scene every day on my way to school:

It's the West Bottoms area of Kansas City. It's this agglomeration of railroads, old buildings (used for haunted houses in the fall), and stretches of highway. Every morning I drive through this area, and lately I've been thinking about all the other places in the world that aren't here.

I've written about this before: how strange and sad it is that while we are busy bustling around areas like the one pictured above, there are millions of acres of beauty sitting silent because we're all crammed into the cities.

This summer, my wife and I are going to Greece. Here is one of the places we are thinking of visiting:

I read a book last summer called The River Why. A line from the book has stuck with me and gnawed at me in the way life-changing literature does. I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote it directly, but I've turned it over and over in my mind for so long that I think I can get it pretty close. 

All those people living crammed in cities like the cities are God's gift to earth, when they could be living on acres and acres of land in the wilderness.

Think about it. We live in an artificial landscape of our own design, and, frankly, a lot of it is poisonous. We live in a mass of steel, stucco, aluminum, plastic, particle board, glass, and metal. We live in a designed reality that requires we give our lives to it to keep it from collapsing. The Sears Tower would collapse in five years without human upkeep. We convince ourselves we're free, when we're really working to keep up a lifestyle that can only be supported by work. It reminds me of the character Desmond in Lost, who must push a button every 108 minutes or, he's told, a terrible thing will happen. He can never venture out too far because he's got to push that button every 108 minutes. One day he doesn't make it in time, and, yeah something bad happens, but it wasn't the end of the world. He's still alive, and the system he was a slave to is destroyed. 

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "I don't want to earn a living; I want to live." Why don't we do that? 

The stark contrast between the two pictures is jarring. We tell ourselves, no, I can't have that, that's only for rich people, I've got too much going on here to leave, I will when I retire, I would go but I've got to save up for a new car, I'll go next month, next summer, next year, next time. We use that excuse next time like we've got an infinite amount of them. If we use next time enough, the only one we'll have left is dying. And like Louis C.K. said, you're going to be dead for way longer than you're going to be alive.